Books

Thai Translation – The Skeptics Handbook

The volunteers keep coming. Please take a moment to appreciate how much work it takes to do a proper translation, to check it, to edit it, and to edit and arrange the artwork. Then take another moment to think of old friends and contacts who might find it interesting, and e-mail it on. Thanks.

11 March: Toronto Sun: Climate science: Let’s follow the money
By LORRIE GOL(D)STEIN, QMI Agency
Take Greenpeace’s widely quoted 2007 report that ExxonMobil spent almost $23 million between 1998 and 2006 funding skeptics who questioned man-made global warming, part of, they say, the oil giant’s campaign to sow confusion with the public.
So, Greenpeace’s argument goes, these skeptics’ views were influenced by money.
Okay. Let’s say that’s true. And, since ExxonMobil is only one company, albeit the biggest and baddest on this issue according to the warmists, let’s say Greenpeace’s research into ExxonMobil uncovered only 1/100th of the total funding the fossil fuel industry and others paid to skeptics. Let’s say it was $2.3 billion. That would certainly be a lot of money.
But as Joanne Nova, an Australian climate blogger (www.joannenova.com.au) and author of The Skeptics Handbook recently noted, it pales beside the $79 billion the U.S. government alone has spent on climate research and technology since 1989. (Nova rejects the science of anthropogenic global warming, which doesn’t change her point.)
Given that kind of public mega-money invested in climate science and technology in just one country, it makes you wonder about some things.
For example, about why the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) still apparently doesn’t have the resources to double-check facts, so that it doesn’t end up doing stupid stuff such as predicting Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035, or getting the amount of land below sea level in the Netherlands wrong by a factor of over 100%. (The list of IPCC errors grows almost daily.)
Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist magazine, explained the heady effect all this public cash, starting decades ago, had on scientists in the U.K., a hot-bed of climate hysteria, in the British documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.
“If I wanted to do research on, shall we say, the squirrels of Sussex … I would write my grant application saying ‘I want to investigate the nut-gathering behaviour of squirrels, with special reference to the effects of global warming,’ and that way, I get my money,” Calder noted. “If I forgot to mention global warming, I might not get the money.”
Exactly. No hoax, just a telling observation of the human tendency of climate scientists, like everyone else, to follow the money. Perhaps to the conclusion that when the political flavour of the month (or decade) is to find evidence of imminent, catastrophic, man-made, global warming, scientific studies over time may tend to overstate conclusions, understate uncertainties and focus excessively on worst-case scenarios.
Which, as we’re now learning, appears, in many cases, to have happened.http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/lorrie_goldstein/2010/03/10/13184851.html

the Maurice Newman/ABC story has followup, so i hope the thread continues to attract comments. am about to post some links there.

Hunger striking farmer Peter Spencer will get his day in the High Court.

Today he’s been granted leave to appeal to the full bench of the High Court in Canberra to determine whether he should be paid compensation for the Commonwealth acquiring his property rights.

Since the late 1990s, Peter Spencer claims he has been unable to farm most of his property because of state laws banning the clearing of native vegetation.

He’s sought compensation in the courts and he claims he can no longer meet his debt repayments.

The sheriff has taken possession of his land and it is to be sold to pay his creditors.

Outside the court, Peter Spencer’s barrister Peter King said it was a welcome decision with wide-ranging implications.

“It is important because, as Peter Spencer has said on a number of occasions, his case is not just about his loss at the hands of government, but for all farmers who have been affected by laws that take or acquire people’s property without just terms.”

Thanks Rick for posting it on, and thanks Karl for noticing the extra slash in the link. Fixed.
And thanks for the link to the Turkey Temperatures Post.
I’d like to know if there is any way of rigging data that they haven’t tried…

It’s more of a “forensics” mind set. I’ve done computer forensics, and one of the things you learn is that it is much much harder to ‘cook the books’ so they come out right under ALL available tools… So always “Come to your opponent out of the Sun.” and “Take nothing that he offers to you.” Sun Tzu. And the best way to assure you have found ‘where the sun is’ in a forensics exam is to come at the data from ALL sides. And never do things in the usual way or the way the other side suggests they ought to be done; if possible, approach from exactly the other direction…)

When you take that approach, you find all kinds of interesting things.

“We all need to be mindful of your hard work and buy you some more chocolate!”

You going to spoil her good looks. Send her gold and silver coins from the Perth mint instead. When the dark ages hordes arrive, hard on the heels of the collapse of the paper currencies, we need at least one enlightenment person, with some purchasing power. Its a bad place these anti-science leftists are taking us too.

As a matter of fact I’m drawing up a manuscript similar to your post this week. Consequently, I have to say “thanks” for kindly allowing this thought provoking write-up to be freely accessible to websurfers. I can notify you when it’s done, if I remember!